It’s said that Fatal Attraction is a cautionary tale about having an affair, but what few people fail to mention is how it qualifies as an Easter movie. For how can one deny that a central part of the plot is the innocent rabbit named Whitey? The sweet pet belonging to the Gallagher family, but more than anyone Ellen (Ellen Hamilton Latzen), Dan’s (Michael Douglas) naïve six-year-old daughter who turns out to be collateral damage in Alex Forrest’s (Glenn Close) game of “psychotic seduction” in that she must suffer the fallout of Alex’s rage directed at her father. De facto the rabbit (and yes, a real [dead] one was actually used for the infamous scene in question). And even though Whitey doesn’t make her official entrance into the Gallagher household until around the one hour and twenty-minute mark of the movie, well over halfway into it, she is arguably the biggest icon of the film.
Like dogs in any movie or TV show of a “thriller-y” nature, the rabbit is probably the second-most assured animal to be harmed or killed in some way (see also: the second episode of Yellowjackets). Something about their purity just seems to set people off on a murderous rampage. To boot, the Gallaghers also happen to have a dog named Quincy, a yellow Labrador retriever who isn’t much for paying attention to potential intruders like Alex. Nonetheless, the dog appears to be spared thanks to the addition of the rabbit to their “brood” in the third act. Indeed, Dan buys the rabbit after initially resisting the notion of getting one for Ellen, but then decides to buy one likely due to the sustained guilt of stepping out on his wife, Beth (Anne Archer). Attempting to pay for his sins by going so far down the, um, rabbit hole with Alex. A woman who remains undeterred by the fact that Dan has moved to Bedford in terms of her stalking capabilities, which she’s only too happy to engage in the night that Dan brings home the rabbit in a generically oppressive black cage.
In a certain regard, that rabbit in its cage is representative of Dan, suddenly all willing to commit completely to being domesticated after he’s been subjected to the wilds of what’s “out there,” i.e. “crazy bitches” such as Alex that make Beth look like a wholesome, obsequious wet dream. After all, Fatal Attraction also seeks to reiterate the Madonna/whore tropes that women are “required” to be lumped into. In pop culture, the tropes have often mutated into various opposing “character types” on the spectrum, from Marilyn and Jackie to Samantha and Charlotte, all symbolizing the same classic “syndrome.” One in which men can only see a woman as his noble, virtuous wife or tartish mistress material in the vein of Alex.
But Alex is not so cavalier about having an affair as Dan would initially like to believe. She’s a “good woman,” she wants him to know, as she also seethes on a tape recording she sends to him, “You thought you could just walk into my life and turn it upside down without a thought for anyone but yourself.” Wanting Dan to suffer the consequences for his actions is the main crux for why she desires to have his “adultery baby,” though she insists it’s because, “I’m thirty-six years old, it may be my last chance to have a child” (oh how things have come a long way for women since that was evidently deemed the “cut-off age” for child-bearing).
Alex eventually chooses to boil the family rabbit—an ultimate symbol of fertility—that she sees the Gallaghers fawning over from afar. This being a metaphorical indication of how she’s given up not only on Dan, but herself. Or rather, the idea of herself as “fit for motherhood”/being the matriarch of a conventional nuclear family. Not if she’s going to have to do it alone, without the one she supposedly “loves.” For this movie is, lest one forget, a transparent riff on Madame Butterfly (which Alex and Dan both discuss their love of early on in the narrative)—embedded in the screenplay’s text long before Mike White decided to create the character of Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) in The White Lotus. However, it seems even Cio-Cio-San wouldn’t go so far as to hurt an innocent creature like Whitey, who is shown being discovered by Beth in the boiling pot in her kitchen just as Ellen is running to an outdoor wooden cage to check on Whitey, only to find the bunny is missing. Thus, at the exact same moment, mother and daughter let out a shriek of terror, the former because of what she sees before her and the latter because of what she doesn’t.
But the rabbit ultimately serves as the key catalyst for getting Dan to confess to his affair. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be able to tell his wife the true culprit behind Whitey’s watery assassination. Thus, with this being Beth’s first glimpse of what Alex is capable of, she’s not all that shocked to find Alex standing behind her in the bathroom in the final scenes of the movie. Brandishing a knife, naturally. Being that the original ending of Fatal Attraction revealed that Alex had killed herself and made Dan look like the murderer, seeing her casually stab at her own thigh while she talks to Beth and accuses her of keeping Dan away from her isn’t that out of depth. Nor is the moment when Alex “reanimates” after Dan is given no choice but to drown her in the bathtub to stave her off from stabbing him and his wife.
Lying there in the tub the same way the rabbit did in the pot, the karmic justice is complete when Alex, too, is rendered as bloody as Whitey after Beth finishes the job with a gun. This leaving Alex to stew in the hot red water just as Whitey was left to do. Despite the poetic “full-circle” scene, Fatal Attraction remains a movie that Easter bunnies and normal bunnies alike are cautioned against watching.
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